By Jim Hoover

Flaming faucets, poisoned water, chemical burns, and even earthquakes could be a legacy of Dick Cheney, our last Vice President of the United States.

His secretive energy agreement with energy company big-wigs during  Bush’s first term still does widespread damage to Americans; but one corrosive practice is dangerously growing, an insidious poisoning of our earth and water through the deadly practice of fracking.

Hydraulic fracturing, called fracking, is a process whereby thousands of gallons of fracking fluid (a mixture of water, sand and as many as 800 chemicals–cancer-causing and toxic) is pumped into the ground to create enough pressure that a rock formation will fracture allowing the escape and capture of natural gas.

The problem is that people who live in the vicinity of the gas wells that energy companies produce have flammable drinking water which smells of chemicals and is poisoned by exposure to the toxins. In some fracking areas, it is reported that children come out of showers with chemical burns all over their bodies. Sheds over wells have burned to the ground.

Colorado’s Weld County resident, Renee McClure, said she couldn’t believe it when her son turned on the kitchen faucet, then held a cigarette lighter next to the running water, causing it to erupt in flames. In Alberta, Canada where the process has matured, ranchers find flaming water common.

In 2005, at the urging of Vice President Cheney, fracking chemicals were exempted from the Clean Water Act. It was yet another example of Cheney seeming to place the profits of monolithic energy companies and their patent secrets over the life and health of the people.

Most of the natural gas drilled in the US uses hydraulic fracturing because it is the cheapest and easiest way to get it out of the ground. The chemicals used in the fracking fluid, clearly toxic, cannot be restricted by the EPA because of that exemption.

Halliburton, a company that provided Cheney, a former CEO, with tens of millions of dollars in retirement and stock options, has gained billions from Bush/Cheney policies: the Iraqi War, oil drilling, including the Deep Water drilling in the Gulf, and now fracking.

Many resulting Halliburton no-bid-contract activities have involved charges of fraud or mismanagement for Halliburton and its offshoot, KBR.

The Fracking drilling technique was developed and patented by Halliburton. In its fracking contracts alone, Halliburton earns around $1.5 billion annually providing hydraulic fracturing to gas companies, a huge return on its ‘Cheney’ investment.  The NY Times reported that  Halliburton illegally injected over 32 million gallons of diesel fuel underground last year while using the controversial drilling technique.

The practice is spreading like a giant fault line across the nation, assuring that the health risks and, most probably, deaths will follow.

The health risks are already known. In the summer of 2008, a Colorado nurse nearly died from exposure when treating a gas field worker whose clothes had been doused by fracking chemicals. Despite suffering from heart, lung, and liver failure, plus kidney damage and blurred vision, the nurse survived. She even survived the drilling company’s refusal to disclose the “proprietary” chemicals she was exposed to–nondisclosure being legal under the Cheney exemption.

More than 1,000 documented cases of contamination of just well-water alone have occurred in Wyoming, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Widespread fracking has occurred in the Marcellus shale in a wide region of Pennsylvania, NY, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, as well as the area of the Barnett shale in Texas.

Last year, government scientists found that private water wells at Pavilion, Wyoming were contaminated with toxic chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing. Seven of the 19 wells contained methane gas, while 11 of the 19 contained 2-butoexythanol phosphate, common in the fracking fluid solvent. Experts consider it potentially lethal, possibly leading to renal toxicity in the spleen, liver and fertility problems.

Two years ago, U.S. Representative Diana DeGette introduced legislation just to provide information about the toxic components of hydrofracturing fluid. It did not pass. However, this bill has recently been reintroduced as HR 1084.

After being reintroduced as HR 1084, not one Republican in a Republican-majority House supports it. This bill has no chance of passing. The certain result is that people near gas drilling operations could be poisoned by toxic chemicals that, by law, need not be disclosed.